I'm working on a project, honing up on my solidworks skills.  I let you follow along from scratch. I'm wanting to build a large quantity of tapered pedestal machinery stands (Vise, Grinder, Swag-off Road Band Saw Table).  In all I need to make five or six of these. So I designed one up with a simple plywood design.  The simple plywood design looks good but rather difficult and very time consuming to glue up. (See photo of temporary blocks glued in place on paper.)

So I saw an alternative construction technique (Shopnotes Issue #97, pg 18 -- If you've never seen this magazine, there are some great projects in there.  I recommend them highly.)  This technique was used on a large cabinet / box structure with vertical sides.

I want to use this technique on a tapered box.  I sketch it up using weldments and a few cuts with surface.  That went smooth. When I go to perform the complete drawing details, I have a major problem pulling off auxiliary views on the index 'leg'.  I spent hours trying to get an auxiliary view to take off.  I could not get view A to pull off correctly.  I finally added a phony element perpendicular to the leg's axis.  Then I was able to pull off auxiliary views so I could do the take off I needed. (And yes I know how to hide the phony element once the aux views are complete.   I left the phony element visible to remind me of how I did this, and to validate View C as TSS - True Size and Shape. )

So here are my questions:

--How do you guys create auxiliary views when the system seems to be fighting you?  Do you create phony elements too?  Is there a better technique?

--If not 2D style descriptive geometry take offs is the a better way to communicate the end view profile, overall lengths and angle cuts of those support elements? (Yes , I know I can do a 3d measure, and write that down on a piece of paper, is that really a best practice?)

--What happened to my butchered View Arrow for view B?  (I've tried every thing to fix that.. its just way too short to be visible.)

Apologies if this question seems long winded.. I wanted you to get into the context...  Many thanks,

LB